In the wee hours of this morning, Nov. 29, Raging Chicken Press achieved a milestone of sorts: 10,000 all-time views. We could not be more thankful for the generous support we have seen and the willingness of readers to pass the word, send links to articles to their family and friends, comment on articles, and subscribe. We hope you will be even more pleased with Raging Chicken Press in the upcoming months.

The next big challenge ahead will be fundraising. We’ve been able to earn a little bit of money from our on-line store and from a few donations from supporters. Revenue from those sources will allow Raging Chicken Press to cover its web-hosting and domain name fees and purchase some equipment such as a tripod and USB drives. However, if we are going to take on all that we want to take on, we are going to need to raise money more aggressively. At this point, it is most likely that we are going to make a strong push in the beginning of 2012 through Kickstarter. If we are able to raise the funds we need, we will be able to fund paid internships for the next couple of years, issue the first paperback edition of the “Best of Raging Chicken Press” in the summer of 2012, launch a small-scale progressive publishing house in cooperation with a local, union-shop printer, and begin to host monthly or bi-monthly progressive meet-ups to facilitate activist networking.

To think that just seven month ago Raging Chicken Press was simply a “cool idea” and now we have just crossed the 10,000 all-time viewer mark after only five issues is pretty remarkable. Once again, I want to thank everyone who has helped make this project possible…from our regular contributors, to our “Raging Chicken Army” who send out links to their networks when each issue is released, to the notes of support and critique we receive from readers. Raging Chicken Press is off to a blazing start thanks to you.

Yes, the long wait is over. The November issue of Raging Chicken Press is up. I am hoping that you will think it was worth the wait. As you might imagine, the Occupy/99% movement takes the lion-share of the space this month. In fact, so much has happened and happened so quickly, that we had to drop a one article that had become outdated and we added in a “part two” to Dustin Slaughter’s piece on Occupy Philly because events moved fast this past week.

As a testament to how fast events are moving, we have not had a chance to begin to digest last night’s forcible eviction of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in NYC, the court order that allowed OWS activists to return to their encampment, and the hundreds of arrests that seemed to continue into the night. In addition, the Mayor of Oakland let it slip that she had a conference call with mayors from 18 U.S. cities with Occupy encampments to coordinate crackdowns and evictions. There is now doubt that we’re entering a new stage of the Occupy/99% movement…what that stage is, however, is undecided at this time. Raging Chicken Press looks forward to covering the continual development of this amazing movement.

The November issue of Raging Chicken Press will be out soon (hopefully by Monday–we’ve been a bit sick here). I know, the waiting game sucks. Well, Raging Chicken Press has got something for at least some of you to do while you are waiting for the next issue.

Raging Chicken Press announces its first ever song contest! More specifically, song parody contest. Frankly, if I had the musical talent, I would have been on this over the summer. But, we all have to accept our short-comings. So, I thought this would be a cool project to push out to fans and friends of Raging Chicken Press.

Have you ever seen Disney’s version of Robin Hood? Well, I loved it as a kid and now my three-year old son loves it too. As I was watching it over the summer, I began to see the possibility of repurposing some of the songs on the soundtrack for our current struggles against right-wing attacks on collective bargaining, public education, social services, and our democracy. I began to think about casting our “beloved” governor, Tom Corbett as “Prince John” the “phony King of England.” In particular, I was thinking about the song “The Phony King of England.” Listen to this song and replace “John” and “England” with “Tom” and “Pennsylvania” and you’ll get the idea:

Got it? If you check out Chris Priest’s repurposing of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (see below) you’ll get the sense of what we’re thinking about here at Raging Chicken Press.

So, we’re going to try a little experiment: We are calling on readers and friends of Raging Chicken Press to submit parodies of the song “Phony King of England” to Raging Chicken Press. All entries will be posted to Raging Chicken Press and readers will have a chance to vote on the best version. The top three entries (if we get that many) will receive their choice of t-shirt from the Raging Chicken Press store. The winning song will also receive Raging Chicken Press’s “Must Read” book of the month.

Here’s the rules:

Song must be a rewritten version of the “Phony King of England” that appears in the video above

Song should replace “John” with “Tom” and Tom should refer to PA Governor, Tom Corbett. Likewise, “England” should be replaced with “Pennsylvania”

All entries must be recorded in MP3 or .wav format.

All final recordings must be loaded up to YouTube. Ideally, the final video should include images to political protest against Tom Corbett and the PA Republican’s austerity budget and other attacks upon working families and the Commons.

Once songs are uploaded to YouTube, an email should be sent to ragingchickenpress@gmail.com including a link to the video, the name(s) of the song writer(s), and contact information including email and mailing address.

All entries should be submitted by November 29th.

Entries will be posted to Raging Chicken Press as they are received. Voting for best parody song will begin on November 30, 2011 and the winner(s) will be announced in December issue.